taken thought as he read it. "No man," Swift finely concludes, "of true
valour and true understanding, upon whom this vice has stolen unawares;
when he is convinced he is guilty, will suffer it to remain in his breast
an hour."

But these attentions to the Whigs as a party and as individuals were,
after all, but the by-play of the skilled orator preparing the minds of
his hearers for the true purpose in hand. That purpose may originally
have been to fix the ministry in the country's favour; but Swift having
fulfilled it, and so discharged his office, turned it, as indeed he could
not help turning it, and as later in the Drapier's Letters he turned
another purpose, to the persuasion of an acceptance of those broad
principles which so influenced political thought during the last years of
the reign of Queen Anne. It is with these principles in his mind that Dr.
Johnson confessed that Swift "dictated for a time the political opinions
of the English nation." He recalled the nation to a consideration of the
Constitution; he attributed to the people (because, of course, they had
elected the new ministry into power) an appreciation of what was best for
the protection of their ancient privileges and rights. The past twenty
years had been a period of mismanagement, in which the Constitution had
been ignored; "but the body of the people is wiser; and by the choice
they have made, shew they do understand our Constitution, and would bring
it back to the old form." "The nation has groaned under the intolerable
burden of those who sucked her blood for gain. We have carried on wars,
that we might fill the pockets of stock-jobbers. We have revised our
Constitution, and by a great and united national effort, have secured our
Protestant succession, only that we may become the tools of a faction,
who arrogate to themselves the whole merit of what was a national act. We
are governed by upstarts, who are unsettling the landmarks of our social
system, and are displacing the influence of our landed gentry by that of